What I have learned from Cakewrecks: always order cakes in person and write down exactly what you want it to say on a piece of paper and give it to them. Another thing I learned from Cakewrecks: There are cake decorators out there who would still screw it up.

I love your blog! I just introduced my daughter to Cake Wrecks yesterday, and let me tell you, we laughed ourselves to tears! What really makes it hilarious is your commentary. Your brand of humor is very similar to our own. It's amazing that these "wrecks" happen so often! If only everyone read your blog!

In response to judas_iscariot_79 "Another thing I learned from Cakewrecks: There are cake decorators out there who would still screw it up."

What I have learned from cakewrecks is that many people who are being paid to be cake decorators are not in fact cake decorators. Thank God the screening process for, jobs like ,..... oh say,....BOMB DISABLER, or you know, the like...appears to be a little more thorough.

Too funny ! Congratulations three times means six balloons?? Is that symmetry math?? And I don't think it is black icing. Looks more like dark chocolate syrup. Our Scrabble dictionary allows CONGRATS or CONGRATULATIONS. No such word without the S. Too, too funny. Wonder what we are celebrating.

I love your website! Last year for Christmas I made a Christmas tree cake by layering a cake in smaller squares. It was about 7 layers. I put a few wooden skewers in the center to hold it together. We traveled 30 miles to my mom's house with it on my lap. I had frosting all over my coat and my hands trying to keep it together. We set it up on the counter and then went outside for family pictures. When we came back in the cake and tipped over and fallen on the floor! I was devastated. Sorry no pic, but I am trying to laugh about it now.

Has anyone else ever noticed the directly proportional relationship between handwriting neatness and message fallacy? The messier the handwriting, the higher your chances that your message will be screwed up.

I don't know, I may be severely whacked out but I find the Congratulation, Congratulation inscription oddly charming.

Yes, it looks like hell. Yes, that black frosting is going to look unappetizing going in and ungodly coming out. Yes, that is a complete wreck of a cake. But there's something about the inscription itself that reminds me of those homemade cards I gave my parents before I learned to spell that makes me go 'awww' at the same time.

Speak not of spotty, bored, untrained young people marking time doing a job they hate for nearly nothing so they can have a little cash in their pockets to buy the latest first-person shooter game and a bit of weed. I prefer to think that somewhere in the back is a sincere - if slightly...okay, hugely inept - person who put heart and soul into producing something that sad for someone's party.

Well, come on, if they actually had to write "congratulations" 3 times on that first cake, they would have had to, like, space it properly! Can't you see there's not room for "congratulations" on the next line down? :p

I especially love the comments by Kamity, Sara and Twistie. Man, their insights were GREAT! Especially Twistie:

"Speak not of spotty, bored, untrained young people marking time doing a job they hate for nearly nothing so they can have a little cash in their pockets to buy the latest first-person shooter game and a bit of weed"

BRILLANT & HILARIOUS & probably MUCH closer to the truth than we think!

I may be reaching here, but I have a suspicion that a great many of these "literal" cakes are decorated by non-English speaking immigrants. Something about the handwriting on some of them make me think of Asian women trying desperately to do the best job they can, for a crappy hourly paycheck, in a culture and language they barely grasp.

Which doesn't make the results any less wrecktastic, but does make me feel some pity for the decorators. Unless I'm wrong, in which case, they're just ijits.

I averted a real cake wreck on Saturday. My friend was hosting a surprise 50th for her husband. She asked me to pick up the cake "at 5:10pm" which to me of course meant pick it up on the way to the party at 7pm. I got to the store and the (high-school aged, smoking while talking on his cell phone) clerk opened the walk-in cooler and said "we don't have it. It's probably at the other stop-n-shop. Did you check there first?"No, of course I didn't go there first, you dumb***. I ended up needing to call my friend, and her husband answered, and I ALMOST ruined the surprise! Silly boy, at my insistence, checked ALL the walkins in the bakery area and, of course, found it!The cake was beautiful, by the way, and tasty too!I believe at 5:10pm the actual decorator would still have been onsite. Live and learn I guess.

To: "Stun bunny" - Okay here's the real industry answer to your question. I am a journeyman baker and a 30 year veteran cake decorator. Somewhere around 10 years ago the entire baking industry changed. All products in the major grocery bakery field became either pre-mix, premade or frozen product. So to put it all quite simply, the "Trade" part of it all died. You can hire anyone green off the street to place a frozen product on a pan and shove it in the oven. And so that is exactly what the industry has done. The got rid of, bought out, or fazed out all their experienced baking staff and started hiring...yep...pretty much anyone with a pulse at minimum wage. All of this of course included the cake decorators. All those eager faces that said....oooooh...I'd like to try that...finally got their chance. Did they have any experience? Nope. Any talent? Nope. Any ambition to make something of quality? Nope. So what did they have????? The willingness to work for minimum wage...oh and as I mentioned earlier....a pulse! Bottom line is that if you want a quality cake now you need to seek out those that left that field and are now working privately like, ....ahem,...ME! :D

There are so many of these cake wrecks that come out of "in-store" bakeries, that as a former grocery store cake decorator, I am thoroughly embarrassed for them! No one that stupid should EVER be hired to be a decorator. Not that I have never made a mistake, but even if I had written, "Congratulations three times", the script would have at least been centered and written straight across, and in much better hand-writing than this one!

I am a professional grocery store cake decorator. I am writing in response to stunbunnys questions: "Can anyone representing the professional cake decorating industry answer this? Are you surrounded by sugar- and flour-encrusted dolts? Do the hiring requirements stop at a single working thumb?"

Yes, no and no.

In my experience as a cake decorator, I have been very lucky to have worked with some decent decorators whose work ordinarily would not be featured on Cake Wrecks. (Not to say that I don't love reading this blog!) On the other hand, in defense of grocery store bakeries, it is hard to find good talented help. (duh!) There is usually some sort of cake decorating skills test performed by potential decorators before anyone is hired to decorate cakes. Often times when a store is in dire need of a decorator they will hire someone out of desperation who says they decorate cakes, or just 'promote from within' because they ARE so desperate to have anyone. Good decorators are never paid what they are worth in a grocery store bakery. That is the unfortunate truth. In my experience, sometimes a bakery has people that are working in the afternoon after the decorator has left for the day. These employees are often asked to write on a pre-decorated cake that a last minute cake customer has picked up out of the case. If a customer forgets to special order a cake or they waited until the last minute to pick up a cake on the way to the party, that is their own fault and they are at the mercy of the bakery clerk to inscribe something on the cake. Often times, they are inexperienced young girls, not fully trained with the skill of writing on a cake. Some folks think "Oh yeah, my handwriting is good, yeah I can write on it for ya"..and they try...only to discover it is harder to accomplish than they think it is. Which I can honestly say with my experience in training those people it IS hard to teach someone to do it right. It takes a lot of practice. I have suggested to our inexperienced bakery employees to NOT write on a cake until you are trained. Get someone else with experience to do it, until I can train you and then see how good you become with practice. Otherwise, I will be left with cakes that have to be fixed the next morning because the customer got mad and didn't want it because it looked bad. I also have to say in our bakery we always read back the order to the customer to make sure we have exactly what they asked for. I always ask for correct spelling of names, even if it sounds simple. You would not believe how many different ways that people spell the name Brittany!! I encourage customers to be specific about their requests, even bringing in an idea on a piece of paper, or color samples. I am not a mind reader. I take pride in my work, and the last thing I want is an unsatisfied customer.

This reminds me of a cake I ordered for my sons 16th birthday. I told them I wanted it to say "Happy 16th Birthday" with a BIG 16 and they literally wrote"Happy BIG 16" on it. I was so mad! My sone thought it was funny.

The first one is still a pretty good cake. It means the same thing. But the second one... that is absurdly hilarious. Wow. Glad no one was around when I laughed at that, or they might think I was crazy.

I remember once at work, each store was supposed to order a cake congratulating the boss, take a picture of it and send the pic to him. I remember telling my best friend, on the way over, that I was writing it out because I didn't want to send in a pic with any retardedness on it and I knew how often congratuations was mispelled. I handed the girl the slip and waited. It seemed to take a long time. And finally, she comes out and hands me the box. As I open it up to inspect, she says to me, "Thank God I caught that spelling mistake." And I died inside. On my cake it said:"Congrabulations Richard"

Hahaha, is the second one from BR? I decorated at a BR for a few years and it sure looks like one the decorators before and after me would make: the tumors on all of the sides, the smeared fudge, bad handwriting and misunderstood message... ahhh, memories :D It *is* fudge, by the way, not black frosting :D

Back then I never really thought about why some customers would be SO explicit with what they wanted. I'd understand the order form perfectly, but they would staple a sketch to it or write out the message EXACTLY how they wanted (line by line). A couple times people had left their order with my coworkers, and then called back to talk directly with me about it to confirm it. Now I know why they were like that...they must have gotten cakes like the ones on this site.

I'm reminded of my brother's 3rd birthday cake. My mom pretty much just said "oh, he likes Ninja Turtles. Make something like that." What she got was a green half circle with a red stripe around it and some eyes and a mouth. My brother even asked her at one point if it was really supposed to be a Ninja Turtle. I should find a picture :D

I think decorators (and even other employees or clerks) who don't understand how the order forms work, or who don't understand what the words and phrases that are typically written on cakes actually mean, or who use quotations for emphasis (oh GOD, my biggest pet peeve ever) are a vast majority in this world. It's also too bad that many employees really do assume that since they know how to write with a pen, they could handle a pastry bag. It's super easy with a lot of practice, but they really do need the practice first.

This blog makes me miss decorating SO much. I wonder if it makes any other former decorators reminiscent, or if it makes them glad to not have to deal with all this mess anymore :D

"I encourage customers to be specific about their requests, even bringing in an idea on a piece of paper, or color samples. I am not a mind reader. I take pride in my work, and the last thing I want is an unsatisfied customer." ---- I totally second this :)

I don't get it. Seriously. I can decorate, write, spell, etc. better than that in my kitchen at home with nothing but my little Wilton books and videos and advice from girlfriends.

I'm starting to understand now why all my friends are coming to me when they want a cake for an occasion rather than going to a bakery. I thought it was just because I charged less, but I see there's more to it!

This reminds me of a cake I bought for my SIL after a promotion. I asked the bakery lady if she could write Congratulations on it. She said yes and proceeded to write on the cake. I could tell she was having a hard time and pausing a lot to read what she had written. When she was done I looked at the cake and discovered she had written - Congraduation! It was funny so I didn't say anything and we had a good laugh while we ate cake. -Ginger

Two "congratulation"s equal congratulations (pl). This one is clear. You can see how it occured cause any sentence requesting the word 'congratulations' can yield this result to a person unfamiliar with the language, would have though he heard a plural.

"And write congratulations on it" means "write multiple instances of the same word on it."

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A Cake Wreck is any cake that is unintentionally sad, silly, creepy, inappropriate - you name it. A Wreck is not necessarily a poorly-made cake; it's simply one I find funny, for any of a number of reasons. Anyone who has ever smeared frosting on a baked good has made a Wreck at one time or another, so I'm not here to vilify decorators: Cake Wrecks is just about finding the funny in unexpected, sugar-filled places.

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